Most of our problems stem from lack of new businesses

2 march 2016
| Rossiyskaya Gazeta

The anti-crisis plan of the Government approved by the Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev comprises 120 points. It is very different from the last year’s anti-crisis plan. “This year’s plan took longer to prepare, there was more debate both about the mechanisms for implementing it and about some of the measures included in it,” Vladislav Onishchenko, the First Deputy Head of the Analytical Center, told a Rossiyskaya gazeta correspondent.

Vladislav OnishchenkoDeputy Head

“While last year’s plan was little more than a set of
separate measures that were supposed to have damped the blows the Russian
economy had received; this year’s plan includes measures in a broad range of
areas whose main job is to stimulate economic growth. And this time around both
the social block of the Government and the Finance Ministry with the
Ministry of Economic Development had to compromise, as otherwise the plan
would simply have been impossible with such unprecedented drop in
the budget revenue,” the expert explained.

According to Mr. Onishchenko, last year’s plan allocated
money ‘a priori and in neat rounded billions’ and performance was then assessed
in terms of how much money got allocated and how much got spent. “Now the
budget revenue crisis has helped and the approach in the new plan is more
rational: it includes assessing spending in detail, with government officials
having to explain each expense. The plan also introduces elements of the
scenario based approach that are a must, given the high level of uncertainty,”
the expert says.

Mr. Onishchenko is sure that most of our problems stem from
the fact that nobody is starting new businesses rather than because no
additional subsidies are being made available. “The only way we can help them
is by sorting out our regulations with an emphasis on ensuring freedom of
entrepreneurship and support for small- and medium-sized businesses,” the
expert believes. “This approach can produce relatively quick results,
especially as a way to combat black market business, because during a crisis
people have more reasons to start flying under the radar.”